Holding banners and chanting slogans against the Egyptian leader, the protesters gathered outside Downing Street on Wednesday. They slammed the Sisi administration for human rights abuses and crackdown on his opponents in the North African country.
Sisi is due to meet with British Prime Minister David Cameron on security cooperation on Thursday.
‘A Despot and a Killer’
The protesters in London were mainly Egyptian emigrants – some of whom had traveled from as far away as Spain – to voice their anger at the UK’s invitation to the former army chief.
“What we have here is a big no to Sisi and Prime Minister Cameron for his invitation to a despot and a killer. We stand here today to say ‘Shame on you Cameron.’ Not in the name of the honorable British people. Not in the name of the Egyptian people…,” Maha Azzam, the head of the Egyptian Revolutionary Council, told the crowd.
The Egyptian Revolutionary Council is a non-governmental organization that campaigns for democracy in Egypt.
“He (Sisi) has no legitimacy in the eyes of the British people. The free Egyptian people reject Sisi… The message is loud and clear, no to fascism, no to military dictatorship,” she said.
“We don’t want him, he’s a killer,” said a demonstrator, adding, “The person we elected democratically is in jail,” referring to former President Mohamed Morsi.
Egypt’s first democratically elected president, Morsi was ousted in a military coup led by the then military chief and current president Sisi in July 2013.
Meanwhile, a spokesman for Amnesty International said the British premier must use the visit to raise human rights concerns, while Human Rights Watch said Sisi’s government has seen “a lack of accountability for many killings of protesters by security forces, mass detentions, military trials of civilians, hundreds of death sentences, and the forced eviction of thousands of families in the Sinai Peninsula.”
